The sound of ticking clocks and watches often provides the accompaniment for William Faulkner's tales of decline and change in the South. A clock strikes the quarter hours in the afternoon quiet of the Sartoris mansion; Miss Emily's "invisible watch" marks the passage of time within the shadowed rooms of the decaying Grierson house; and Quentin Compson's timepiece, once his grandfather's, its hands twisted off, ticks on, adding to the sound and the fury of his final day. The sound is appropriate because, as Robert Penn Warren has observed, "the anguish of time, the tension of change," is Faulkner's basic theme. But in Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning," there is a silent clock. In the wagon of Abner Snopes, "among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings," there is a clock, "which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time." (p. 434)

"Barn Burning" is a chapter in the continuing story of [the South's] stubborn retreat. A generation after the war, the planter-aristocracy is still quite powerful as we see by the fact that Major de Spain is a large landowner and lives in a white mansion, staffed by Negro servants and furnished with imported rugs and glittering chandeliers. But there has been an erosion of his authority…. The Justice of the Peace, although finding against the plaintiff Snopes, reduces by half the penalty assessed against him by his landlord. It is thus symbolically appropriate that the broken clock is in the possession of a barn burner who, by means of the law and the torch, is successfully challenging the authority of a standard-bearer of the old tradition. For time is on the side of Abner Snopes. He represents a new emerging force, a new class, in the post-bellum South. When he walks across the "hollow portico" at the Major's mansion, his stiff foot strikes the boards with "clocklike finality."… But the glow in the night sky tells us that he has lost this skirmish, too. Meanwhile, "the slow constellations" wheel on…. (p. 436)